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India inherited a system of representative and responsible government from Britain, a large part of which was incorporated in the new constitution of independent India. But in the early 1960s it was already becoming clear that this political system could not long continue without change; and the probability is that the change would be considerable. A system deriving its inspiration from a homogenous, tight little nation-state like Britain could scarcely fit a sub-continent of heterogeneous elements like India.Already, under a deceptively smooth surface, important changes in the nature of Indian political life were taking place. Originally published in 1963, the purpose of these collected studies was to explore, in the rapidly changing situation, the intimate relationship of Indian politics and society and to indicate the ways in which the deeper social and political currents were moving. As an aid in assessing the degree of change in the modern political life of India, several studies of traditional attitudes towards politics in the Hindu and Muslim empires are included, along with an assessment of the central meaning of the fundamental British statement of policy in the Montagu Declaration of 1917. Against this background, the greater part of the volume discusses the practices and trends of the previous few years.

The social sciences have been heavily influenced by modernization theory, focusing on issues of economic growth, political development and social change, in order to develop a predictive model of linear progress for developing countries following a Western prototype. Under this hegemonic paradigm of development the world tends to get divided into simplistic binary oppositions between the ‘West'and the ‘rest', ‘us'and ‘them'and ‘self'and ‘other'. Proposing to shift the discussion on what constitutes the ‘Other'as opposed to the ‘Self'from philosophy and cultural studies to the social sciences, this book explores how the structural asymmetries existing between Western discourses and the realities of the non-Western world manifest themselves in the ideas, institutions and socio-political practices of India and China, and in how far they shape the social scientist's understanding of their discipline in general. It provides a counter-narrative by revealing the relativity of geographies, and by showing that the conventional presentation of core elements of the Asian socio-political set-up as ‘aberrations'from the Western models fails to acknowledge their inherent strategic character of adapting Western concepts to meet local requirements.Drawing on multiple disciplines, concepts and contexts in India and China, the book makes a valuable contribution to the theory and practice of politics, as well as to International and Asian Studies.